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Citizens! Check out this weeks Meet the Devs, with John Schimmel! Meet the Devs: John Schimmel – with James Pugh. JP – Welcome to Meet the Devs. I’m James Pugh, with me this...

Citizens!

Check out this weeks Meet the Devs, with John Schimmel!

Meet the Devs: John Schimmel – with James Pugh.

JP – Welcome to Meet the Devs. I’m James Pugh, with me this week is John Schimmel. John.

JS – Do you want to start that again?

JP – No, I like that, lets keep going with it. So why don’t you give, I want a little backstory, how did you hear about the project, how’d you get started on it?

JS – I have known Chris for about a dozen years. I was his president of production at Ascendent pictures, when he took his hiatus from Gaming and became a filmmaker. So I knew him then, and you know, I knew about this company from a continuing string of lunches when he was putting it together. And then, when the company came together, he invited me in as a story consultant, to work with Dave Haddock, who was the only writer at that time, to sort of craft the story for SQ42, and then maybe a year and a half ago, I came on full-time as head of linear content.

JP – Yeah, when I first got here, the first thing you were working on was all the commercials, that’s what I remember you from.

JS – All the commercials and the inside CIG’s, we did a lot of, we did the run-up to that first Pax East, and we did a lot of the looks at Moon Collider, and at Behaviour and, you know, so yeah. A bunch of those. But I’ve sort of run out of time to do that, because of the nature of the shoot, and the fact that I’m not here.

JP – So you were with Chris at ascendant pictures.

JS – I was.

JP – From there, he kinda went back into games and you were like, oh, lets follow him?

JS – well, sort of, yeah.

JP – Have you ever done games before?

JS – I have never done games before, so part of what I love about this gig is how much I’m learning about digital technology, and about how games work, and how this whole process works. I’m much more interested in process than in product, in general, and the process of this is utterly fascinating.

JP – So what made you originally just want to get into film?

JS – To get into film? jI had a whole other life in New York as a Bass player, and somewhere towards the end of my Bass player time, I read an article in the New Yorker magazine by John McFee about Nuclear Terrorism, and I said, there’s a film in this. And I sent it to a friend who was a screenwriter, and he invited me to come to LA and write it with him. He said, yeah, there is a film in this, so we wrote it, and we sold it to Fox, and it did not get made, but i was totally bitten by the movie bug, so here I am.

JP – I think that’s the only time in the history of the world someone can say I got into films because of nuclear terrorism.

JP – you did make an awesome commercial about it. Alright, well, thank you again for joinnig us. I know the fans are really excited for the shoot, and I know they’re really excited for someone with the experience you have

JS – Well, it’s going to be amazing. What comes out of Ealing is going to blow people away, I think.

Erris is Canadian. He does some random things for Relay, no-one really knows what, but still they're stuck with him. He’s also written one Young Adult novel that he can’t stand, which can be found here.